Critical Essay by Murray M. Schwartz

SOURCE: "'The Use of Force' and the Dilemma of Violence," in The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 59, No. 4, Winter, 1972-73, pp. 617-25.

In the following essay, Schwartz offers a psychoanalytic reading of "The Use of Force, " focusing on Williams's representation of violence in the story.

My subject is a very short story by William Carlos Williams called "The Use of Force," about a doctor who forces a spoon into a little girl's mouth to reveal diphtherial membranes that she has been hiding for three days. But, as so much else in Williams' art, it also represents the dynamics of violence, the convergence of motive and situation which transforms the apparently ordinary into the revelation and partial recognition of sadistic desire enclosed by it. In this condensed expression of a critical incident in the life of a doctor we see the...